Why HFA? ﻿HFA has been committed to getting the publishing community paid since 1927

HFA has been working with music publishers to administer copyrights and ensure that songwriters get paid for over 85 years. That used to mean working closely with publishers to make sure that record labels were getting the proper licenses and making timely and accurate royalty payments. Because of the tremendous impact the digital music marketplace has had on the music industry in the last decade, however, HFA has expanded its business offerings beyond music publishers. HFA re-engineered its technology platforms and now helps many of the industry’s emerging digital players get the millions of licenses they need to run their growing businesses while also ensuring that they are compensating music publishers for their intellectual property.

Although the digital revolution has drastically changed the way we do business, HFA is still very client-focused, providing hands-on support and service to our publishers. We are dedicated to helping our publishers at the highest collective level by, for example, working with licensees to offer publishers new business opportunities. At the same time, we are committed to working with publishers on an individual transactional level, for example, by providing detailed royalty statements. We also offer our publishers online tools and services so they can effectively manage their business.

The digital music marketplace has created new revenue streams for music publishers and HFA’s flexible affiliation allows publishers to take advantage of individual opportunities to meet their specific business strategies. For example, some publishers may prefer to handle their physical and permanent download licensing themselves, but may want HFA to represent their catalogs for interactive streaming licensing for services such as Spotify or lyric licensing for a provider like LyricFind. Publishers can also affiliate on an a la carte basis for Songfile, our online mechanical licensing tool, created specifically for the DIY market as well as for religious and educational organizations. Millions of songs are available for licensing through Songfile and the royalties are paid to the publisher commission free.

Another advantage to affiliating with HFA is our longtime relationships with music distributors. Those relationships enable us to get publishers paid faster and help us to ensure more accurate royalty payments. It’s a win-win for publishers and music distributors: publishers don’t have to deal with numerous distributors and distributors don’t have to make thousands of individual payments directly to publishers. Distributors make a single payment to HFA then HFA calculates and distributes a consolidated payment to publishers.

Another way HFA makes sure publisher royalty payments are accurate is our income tracking function, handled by a specialized team that closely monitors charts and sales data. While HFA is known for recovering underpayments through royalty compliance examinations, proactive income tracking allows for more timely collection, distribution and reconciliation of royalties; so important to the effective administration of copyrights.

We also provide new revenue opportunities for our publishers with new media services such as online music services, lyrics, guitar tablature, background music and digital jukeboxes that would be difficult for publishers to arrange on their own.

To affiliate with HFA, your publishing company must make at least one song available for licensing through HFA that has been commercially released by a third party within the last twelve months. To get started, please visit harryfox.com/affiliate.

If you are not sure that affiliation is right for you, you can still establish an HFA Publisher online account to register your song catalogs with us without going through the affiliation process. By doing so, we can make sure you are paid by licensees such as Spotify and Rhapsody who have engaged HFA to administer publishing royalties on their behalf. To set up an HFA Publisher online account and register your songs with HFA, please visit www.harryfox.com/pubonlineacount

John Raso is VP of Client Services at HFA. When he isn’t helping our publishers, you can find him curating the HFA office movie night or on Twitter at @JRaso.

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